Digital transformation has become a ‘suitcase word’ (i.e. you can throw anything into this kind of meme) that really stands for many other major developments in technology and culture that have erupted in the past 5 years. The megashifts will change our world more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years, and understanding them well today is certain to make all the difference, tomorrow. These 10 megashifts are the key to success in the future: digitization, mobilisation, datafication (everything is becoming data), cognification (everything is becoming intelligent), personalisation (every user can be individually addressed now), augmentation (we can see the world with new eyes, AR / VR), virtualisation (what used to be ‘stuff’ is now zeros and ones), automation (what people used to do is now done by machines and software), disintermediation (old middlemen fade and new platforms take over), robotization (robots are going to be everywhere)...

“50% of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way.

A recent study found 50% of occupations today will be gone by 2020, and a 2013 Oxford study forecasted that 47% of jobs will be automated by 2034. A Ball State study found that only 13% of manufacturing job losses were due to trade, the rest from automation. A McKinsey study suggests 45% of knowledge work activity can be automated.

94% of the new job creation since 2005 is in the gig economy. These aren’t stable jobs with benefits on a career path. And if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job. Amazon has 270k employees, but most are soon-t0-be-automated ops and fulfillment. Facebook has 15k employees and a 330B market cap, and Snapchat in August had double their market cap per employee, at $48M per employee. The economic impact of Tech was raising productivity, but productivity and wages have been stagnant in recent years.”